About Us

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a global non-profit dedicated to supporting Ethereum’s long-term success. Our mission is to allocate resources to critical projects, advocate for Ethereum within the ecosystem, and promote its vision to the world.

Protocol is the Ethereum Foundation’s R&D group, with the mission of bringing the world computer to the world. Our research, engineering and delivery teams work at the frontier of multiple domains to execute on Ethereum’s ambitious roadmap without compromising on our guiding principles.

About the Role

The Performance Engineering Lead at Protocol will drive the scalability and robustness of Ethereum in real-world production scenarios. Your primary mission will be ensuring Ethereum can meet the demands of global usage at scale. You will collaborate closely with our internal DevOps team, EthPandaOps, Ethereum client teams, and applied researchers to identify and resolve bottlenecks, improve node and network performance, and enhance Ethereum’s overall efficiency in live, production environments.

Responsibilities

• Establishing a comprehensive approach to performance monitoring, profiling, and optimization specifically tailored for large-scale production deployments of Ethereum nodes, such as RPC services.
• Working closely with EthPandaOps and external ecosystem stakeholders to identify, analyze, and resolve performance issues at scale.
• Analyze and improve industry standard approaches used for node snapshots and quick restores used by large scale deployments of Ethereum nodes.
• Developing and refining tools, benchmarks, and best practices to ensure optimal performance of Ethereum across diverse, real world distributed deployments.
• Collaborating with Ethereum client teams and researchers to translate performance insights into actionable improvements for Ethereum clients and core infrastructure.
• Guiding strategic decisions through rigorous data-driven analysis and clearly communicating bottlenecks and proposed solutions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comprehensively surveying various performance bottlenecks affecting Ethereum scalability, including state, data, execution, and node performance, and identifying candidate solutions to systematically address each one.

This role is ideal for a senior engineer who thrives in environments combining complex distributed systems, large-scale monitoring, and data-driven performance optimization.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in performance engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure roles, ideally with direct responsibility for large-scale production deployments.
• Demonstrated experience profiling distributed systems, systematically identifying bottlenecks, and delivering clear, measurable performance improvements.
• Strong hands-on experience operating clusters of distributed nodes or services, particularly in production scenarios with high user traffic. Ideally with experience in Kubernetes, Nomad or a large scale orchestration platform.
• Familiarity with Ethereum node infrastructure or equivalent distributed systems, and a deep understanding of their performance characteristics.
• Exceptional collaborative and communication skills, with proven ability to work cross-functionally and align diverse stakeholders on performance-driven outcomes.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience managing clusters of Ethereum nodes (e.g., RPC endpoints, validator nodes, indexing services) under high-volume conditions.
• Proven expertise in performance profiling and optimization of blockchain infrastructure or similar highly complex distributed systems.
• Experience collaborating closely with DevOps teams to streamline deployments and establish robust, continuous performance monitoring systems.